Jerricho

by Dale Mayer

  “I sure hope none of the women are taken again,” he said. “I think they’ve all been through enough.”

  “Yeah, we don’t have any way to guarantee that. It’s not a very stable situation here.”

  “And, even with consulates, I wonder if they would help everybody to get home.”

  “I would hope so, but it might also be a case of having to buy your way.”

  “In which case, most of these women won’t have the money needed.”

  Killian thought about that for a long moment and nodded. “We might have to help them.”

  Jerricho winced at that. “I really don’t want to take nine months to travel around and deliver people to their homes.”

  Killian burst out laughing. “I was thinking more of the money issue. Making sure that we pay the right people to get them onto the right flights.”

  “Could cost a fair bunch of money,” he said.

  “I know, but, if any of them were my sister, I would want somebody to step up and to help.”

  Jerricho quickly pulled out his phone and sent Diesel a message, asking if there was any money to help the women.

  Diesel came back with Maybe. Let me check into it.

  Jerricho nodded and said, “There’s a good chance we can do something.”

  “That’s why I like this outfit,” Killian said, with a smile. “They’re not just about the mission and the end of that goal but about the end result. In this case, these women need to go home.”

  “And thirty-eight of them is thirty-eight flights so already a bunch of money.”

  “Some of them might drag up some support, but the others?” he said. “The consulates and the countries might help.”

  “Maybe, if we can get people to step up.”

  “It’s always that problem, isn’t it?” Killian said in an amusing voice. “We can only do so much. We can only take people to water, but they still have to step up and help a little more than normal.”

  “I suggest we go find law enforcement, or what passes for law here, and see what help they’ll provide for these women.”

  On that note, Killian quickly redressed in his least-dirty jeans and his not-as-dirty T-shirt and said, “We need to do laundry overnight.”

  “I was considering just asking for a change of clothes as well.”

  “Then order me a set too.”

  With that, he sent Diesel a quick text and said they were going to check out law enforcement. They locked up the hotel room and headed downstairs. As they got to the main lobby, there was a commotion with so many women standing in the center. Jerricho walked over, finding Jessie in the middle of it. “What’s going on?”

  She looked at him with relief. “The law enforcement doesn’t appear to want to help some of these women get back home again.”

  “That’s what we’re just coming to check about,” he said. “Who’ll have trouble getting home?”

  “Some of the women live a long way away,” Jessie said. “And the flights are expensive, and they don’t have the money.”

  “Of course not,” Jerricho said. He frowned and looked at Killian. “I left a bundle of cash I took off the pirate leader with the captain for the two families of the men who were killed by those pirates,” he said, “but, if we find anybody here who’s connected to the kidnapping ring or the pirates, I suggest we take whatever money they’ve gotten to help these women.”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice,” Killian said, “but we don’t know for sure anybody connected is even here.”

  “They’ll be here,” he said. He looked at Jessie and said, “We’ll go talk to law enforcement to see what we can come up with.”

  She nodded and quickly turned to one of the women beside her. The word passed through the group quickly, and they all turned to look at him with hope.

  He held up a hand. “We can only try.”

  At that, the women all nodded, although he doubted very many actually understood what he said. But, on that note, they headed out onto the main street and, using their GPS, managed to make their way to local law enforcement office, and they stepped inside.

  As soon as they entered the building, Jerricho asked for a translator. Giving his name, several men stepped forward and helped. Very quickly they understood that the hotel itself would have a guard stationed in the lobby, but that was it. They were doing their best to help the women, four of whom were still in the hospital, as it was easier to keep them there under another guard than the bulk of the women who were in the hotel.

  The authorities were already contacting consulates in several countries and were busy making arrangements for the women who could leave. Apparently twenty-four of them could be easily moved out and would be doing so in the morning, after they had had a chance to recover and to rest. Out of the other twelve—not counting Jessie and Brenna—two in the hospital would need a little bit more care, and that left ten, who they were still struggling with. He looked at Killian. “Twelve is not bad.”

  “Twelve is fine,” Jerricho said, and it took a little bit to sort through costs to get the women home, who could pay for it, who could help these other women, and when could they actually get out. And very quickly, with Jerricho’s and Killian’s assistance, they had flights booked for the women and contact information for them at the hotel.

  The police station contacted individually all twelve, knowing the two in the hospital would be flown home later. For the other ten, by the time all their flights were booked and they had a chance to call people at home, already several hours had gone by.

  Jerricho looked down at his watch, frowned, and said, “I need food.”

  “I agree,” Killian said. “Shall we head back to the hotel?”

  He thought about it and said, “I guess. Still feels a bit odd.”

  “Yes,” he said, “but it’s what we need to do next.”

  The men were forking over the money themselves, and the local authorities looked confused. The cops had initially been delighted that it wouldn’t fall on them. But, when it came out of Jerricho’s and Killian’s own accounts and credit cards—faster than Diesel wiring the money—the local cops looked more than stunned and confused, as to why these American guys would even bother.

  Once the authorities had all the info they needed from the women, they were all sent back to the hotel to await their flights.

  As they walked out, Killian said, “it sucks in a world where the women have so little value that helping them out is considered to be a shocking thing.”

  “Right. I was just thinking that,” Jerricho said. “Too bad we can’t pick up the Earth, give it a good scrub and shampoo to rid it of all that attitude against women and minorities,” he said quietly. “At least we know that we’ve done the right thing.”

  “Absolutely. The funny thing is, nobody will even know.”

  “And that’s fine,” Jerricho said. “That’s the way it should be. We don’t do things for the kudos. We do things because it needs to happen.”

  “I won’t argue with you there,” Killian said.

  As they headed back toward the hotel, Jerricho asked, “What do you want to do about food?”

  “Either we pick up something or we go to the restaurant in the hotel, but I don’t know how late it’s open,” he said. “We’re actually a little later than we intended to be now.”

  As they walked through the town, a small café was open. They popped in, grabbed what looked to be sandwiches but in flatbread, and took it back to the hotel. As they walked into the lobby, it was empty. “I presume everybody has crashed,” he said.

  “They’re all exhausted. I need a few more hours of sleep myself,” Killian said.

  “As soon as we eat,” he said, “we should get a good night’s rest.” And he walked up to their floor, unlocked the door, and stepped in, on the bed were several packages of clothing. Jerricho smiled and said, “Look at that delivery service.”

  “I do love that about this system,” he said. “Because we do need some things delive
red, and it’s nice to know that no questions are asked, just, What do you need? And, the same day, here it is.”

  Jerricho put the food down on the table and turned at the voice from the hallway. And there was Brenna.

  She smiled up at him. Obviously washed, showered, and looking a whole lot better, she stepped forward with a bright smile.

  “You look like you’re fully recovered.”

  “I wouldn’t say fully,” she said, with a light laugh. Then she looked at the food and said, “That answers that question.”

  “What question?”

  “I wanted to see if you wanted to go down to the restaurant,” she said.

  He looked at her in surprise, then looked at Killian, who motioned at the bag and said, “We just picked up food, but there’s lots, if you want to join us.”

  She looked at him. “I don’t want to take your food away. I just didn’t want to go to another strange place alone. And Jessie is staying in the room. She’s not feeling that well.”

  “Right,” Jerricho said. “We just came back from the station, trying to help all the women. We pretty well got everybody straightened away, except for you two, and we’re taking you back to the US with us.”

  “Right,” she said. She stepped back out of the room and said, “I’ll go pick up some food.”

  “Almost everything is closed,” Jerricho said. “You might as well come in and have some of ours.” She hesitated; he shook his head. “Come on. It won’t be the first meal we’ve shared.”

  “No, that’s true,” she said, taking a good look at him. “And thank you. I appreciate it.” As she sat down at the table, she looked at everything and asked, “How many people are you expecting to feed?”

  “It’s funny,” Jerricho said, “because I hemmed and hawed about how much to get and then decided to get extra, thinking about tomorrow morning. But tomorrow morning we can always get more.”

  “Good,” she said, as she reached for one of the big wrap sandwiches. “It looks really interesting.”

  “And that’s always a good thing,” he said. The three of them sat here peaceably eating. “What about Jessie? Did she want something picked up?”

  “She’s having trouble keeping food down,” she said, with a sideways grin, “Baby is making himself a little more known than she had expected at this point.”

  “As long as she’s okay,” he said in concern.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s been a pretty stressful time.”

  “True. Hopefully it’ll be not so stressful going forward.”

  “I just want to get her home, where she’s safe and sound,” she murmured.

  “And what will you do when you get home?”

  “I don’t know what I’ll do,” she said. “Go home, but not to my family. Yet I don’t want to go back to my apartment.” She shrugged. “It’ll feel very strange after all this.”

  “Does it feel strange after all your traveling anyway?”

  “Not really,” she said. “This one was just particularly bad.” She quickly finished her sandwich, and then she stood and said, “I’ll head downstairs to my room.”

  “I’ll take you,” he said. He got up, snagged the garbage, tossed it, then looked at Killian and said, “You get some sleep. I’ll take her back down, make sure she’s okay.”

  As they headed out to the hallway, Killian got up and left for the bathroom. She looked at him, as they closed and locked the door. “Any chance of going for a walk outside?”

  He looked at her in surprise. “Why?”

  “Five minutes of sightseeing,” she said in a gentle voice. “I know I saw lots when I was first here, but, at the same time, I probably won’t ever come back. I’d like to at least walk the town.”

  He hesitated.

  “Or is it not safe?”

  “No way to know,” he admitted. “Going out for a few minutes won’t hurt,” he said, “if it will help you to sleep.”

  “I’m still too keyed up for that,” she said quietly. “It feels like it’s over, but then it feels like it’s not over.”

  “I would say it’s not over,” he said, “at least not yet.”

  “Right.” She sighed. “I just want it all over with.”

  “I get that,” he said, “and we’re heading home soon.”

  She nodded.

  “Are you going back to the same job?”

  “Ever since the conversation with Jessie, I’ve been rethinking it.”

  “That’s up to you,” he said. “You mentioned it before, so it has to be something that you’re comfortable with.”

  She nodded. “And I don’t know what I’m comfortable with. It just feels like another major milestone in my life, like another major change coming up. Or a fork in the road.”

  “Change isn’t necessarily bad,” he said.

  As they stepped out the front door to the hotel, he held out his hand and said, “Stay close to me, please.”

  She tucked her hand up against his elbow and said, “Absolutely. Being female and alone, I don’t think I’d do a whole lot of traveling like that again.”

  “Not even with Jessie?”

  “No,” she said. “Something like this changes you. I keep looking over my shoulder. I keep wondering where the next attack will come from. I know that it doesn’t make any sense and that just because it happened once doesn’t mean it’ll ever happen again, but it’s a hard thing to shake off.”

  “Particularly right now, when you’re still so close to it,” he murmured.

  “And I get that too,” she said, “so I don’t want to make a big deal out of it. But, at the same time, it’s hard not to at least constantly be aware of it.”

  Outside on the front steps, she took several long slow deep breaths of the sultry air. “So different than being on the water,” she said.

  “Even though we’re close, and can smell the saltiness,” he said, “there’s a freshness coming down from the valley.”

  She nodded, and together the two of them walked around the small town. Everything was closed; everything was silent, but there was still a uniqueness. Most of the town consisted of stone or some mud-brick buildings, but there was a classiness, just a historic agelessness to the whole town. By the time they walked around the entire settlement, she smiled and said, “Thank you.”

  “Are you ready to go back now?”

  “I think so,” she said. “Thankfully a boogeyman didn’t appear around every corner.”

  “No, and that should help you sleep.”

  “Maybe. I’ve learned everybody could be the predator that’s after me next, even if I don’t want it to be.”

  At the front door of the hotel, she sighed. “I know I need to go to bed,” she confessed, “but I don’t really want to.”

  “No pubs are open, and there’s no common area to just sit and enjoy,” he said, “unless you want to go back outside again.”

  She shrugged. “No, it’s fine.”

  He walked her to her room, and then she unlocked the door and stepped in. She turned, smiled up at him, and said, “I did want to say that it’s really nice to see you again.”

  “It’s really nice to see you too,” he said in surprise. “Obviously it is a surprise.”

  “I know, right?” she said, laughing. “At the same time, it’s nice because I feel like I’m a very different person than I was.”

  “You are,” he said, “and I really appreciate that.”

  “Thank you,” she said, with a smile, and turned to go inside.

  “I’m really proud of you,” he said quietly. “You’ve come a long way.”

  “I know it feels like I should have come a lot further, faster, but, hey, it is what it is.”

  “Don’t do that,” he said, grabbing her by both shoulders and giving her a gentle shake. “You shouldn’t knock yourself down. You’ve done a lot of work, and you’ve become somebody who you could be proud of. That’s more than most people can say they’ve done.”

  She s
miled. “Thank you, that means a lot. You’re one of those checkboxes that I needed to deal with, before I could move on.”

  He tilted his head and looked at her sideways. “Move on, in what way?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, aiming for that honesty again. “Just feels like I did you wrong.”

  “You didn’t do me wrong,” he said stepping back to lean against the doorjamb, his arms crossed over his chest. “You did what you needed to do for yourself back then. I’m okay with that.”

  “I was a bitch.”

  “You were,” he said cheerfully. “And I recognized it, and I left.”

  She burst out laughing. “Okay, for that,” she said, “I appreciate it.”

  “I’m not unfinished business,” he said. “If we move forward as friends, don’t drag that behind us.”

  “Oh,” she said, “that’s a good way to look at it too.”

  “We have known each other for a long time,” he said. “We’ll just leave it at that.” Her smile fell away. He looked at her and asked, “What’s the matter?”

  “It just was so nice to see you,” she said, “I guess I overstepped the balance.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked in exasperation.

  She looked at him, frowned, and said, “You said, just leave it at that.”

  He looked at her, blinked several times, and then started to chuckle. “I meant, we don’t need to discuss you having a checkbox to clear with me,” he said. “We’re both fine as we are right now. Obviously I want to stay in touch, and it’s nice to see you. We used to have quite the thing together.”

  “We did,” she said, “but, outside of it being dynamite in bed, I’m not sure there was a whole lot else to it.”

  “Back then, being dynamite in bed was really, really good,” he said, with a cheeky grin.

  At that, she burst out laughing again. “You always used to make me laugh,” she said, shaking her head.

  “You know what? You’re right. I’m not quite ready to go to sleep either. It’s nice to just talk.”

  “Yes,” she said, “but it’s not as if there’s any place to go here. You’ve got Killian in your room, and I’ve got Jessie in mine.”

  “A couple chairs are down at the end of the hallway there. If you want,” he said, “we could watch a sunset or maybe see if the stars are out.”